Montag, 9. Oktober 2017

This artist book is being published in occasion of Philipp Gufler’s exhibition “I wanna give you devotion” in Munich in Sept 2017. The exhibition combines historical posters and flyers with works by 29 artists and collectives, which Gufler specifically invited in order to question, actualize and expand on the poster collection of the archive forum homosexualität münchen e.V.. A selection of this historical and current material is collected within the artist book and is extended through text contribution by Kerstin Stakemeier/Philipp Gufler and members of the forum. It’s been published by the Hammann Von Mier Verlag in the forum-series „Splitter“, which discusses historical and sociocultural issues and presents historical figures.

Bei Cosy

16th June – 8th July 2017Open every Friday and Saturday from 5-11pm

Bei Cosy is a somewhere between an exhibition, a bar and a costume party, taking place over 4 weeks in the belly of RONGWRONG. The project will feature a roster of invited artists hosting events every Friday and Saturday night and a series of newly commissioned works entitled Fingerbekenntnisse. Taking its name from a celebrated bar in Munich run by the artist Cosy Pièro from 1962-82, the project will pay homage to her work, the significance of her bar and its active position in the sexual politics of the time.
Although many of the patrons of Bei Cosy are today celebrated figures or have faded into obscurity – together they represent an essential yet fragile history, a complex interwoven web of art, sex, inclusion/exclusion, gender identity and sociability. It is these moments that become ‘lost’ or forgotten within mainstream historical accounts. This new Bei Cosy is intended to critically address the role social spaces play in our social, sexual, artistic and political lives – creating a new context for particular histories and archival material to emerge amongst new works and an intergenerational community of artists.

The concept of Bei Cosy is by Philipp Gufler and Richard John Jones in collaboration with Cosy Pièro, Sands Murray-Wassink and Laurie Cluitmans.

Fingerbekenntnisse

This series of newly commissioned works depart from an infamous series of drawings that Pièro made for her bar that were seized under obscenity laws in Munich in 1963 and were most likely destroyed. The drawings depicted cats with women's heads and huge breasts engaged in a variety of acts with one another. Through the commissions, the invited artists have been asked to respond to these lost works of Pièro as a gesture of solidarity whilst also reinventing and reimaging these works from their own perspectives.

These Fingerbekenntnisse are shown together with a new work by Pièro in the bar designed specially for Rongwrong by Johannes Büttner, Gufler and Jones.

Events

Saturday 17th June
19:00
VERA HOFMANN: We keep losing our spaces but we still hold [on to] each other

Friday 23rd June
19:00
LAURIE CLUITMANS: With the taste of a poison paradise

Made possible with the generous support of the Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst and in cooperation with De Ateliers, Amsterdam.

Bei Cosy, installation photo. From left to right: Richard John Jones, ALL CLOSING AND DYKE
BAR AND EVERYTHING ENDING AND NOT AND DEATH TO THE AHISTORIC VACUUM
(2015); Philipp Gufler, MENU BEI COSY 1963 (2017); Cosy Pièro, ‘VIELLEICHT HABE WIR
SOLCH GROSSE SEHNSUCHT JA VERDIENT’ (PERHAPS WE HAVE DESERVED SO MUCH
DESIRE) (2009-17)

You are cordially invited to the festive opening of Offspring 2017: DEEP STATE on Tuesday May 16, 6-8 pm with a reading from my artist book "Indirect Contact" with Fantasma at 9 pm.
Exhibition: May 17-28, open daily 12-6 pm

Montag, 27. Februar 2017

Philipp Gufler "Romankreisen"

Opening: Friday 24.3.201720 H: Reading by Fantasma and Philipp Gufler from his book “Indirekte Berührung”Exhibition: 25.3. - 15.4.2017"The whole novel touches its own page bottom and turns to the next page" Hubert Fichte on his literary project "Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit"

The title of Philipp Gufler’s first show at BQ borrows a term from the German novelist and ethnographer Hubert Fichte (1935 – 1986). Fichte associated this literal translation from Greek with the concept of a circular novel, which in its course returns to the point of departure. In his show, Gufler adapts Fichte’s thought as the conceptual idea of an abstract, orbital movement to reflect on exemplary themes, methods and forms that feature in his body of work. The artist book Indirekte Berührung / Indirect Contact forms the central piece of the exhibition and relates its elements in the form of a logbook. The installation includes mirrors that have been transformed with transparent colour pigments as well as layered fabrics with varying prints. These quilts are hung in the space and also constitute a separate space within the gallery. The last element is an acrylic glass showcase onto which the documentation of a previous performance is projected.

Making use of screen-printing on blue and pink plastic film with spiral binding (a technique which features prominently in his works), Gufler’s prose also takes a shape in which enables its haptic qualities to be experienced. Within these pieces, the reader encounters different characters, some of whom have inspired and influenced Gufler’s artistic production for a long time. They all position themselves on a fictional time scale, stretching from 1597 – the year in which the early baroque painter Caravaggio supposedly started work on his Narcissus – up to 2075 – the future year in which the performance een gebeueren, enacted in 1975 by the Dutch artist Ben d’Armagnac (1940 – 1978), will see its 100th anniversary. Besides locating these two artistic positions that are of personal relevance for Gufler, the years also serve as markers for a wide spectrum of reference points in his works that are often based on artistic research. All major characters – researchers, writers and artists alike – share a fundamentally critical attitude towards the norms of their time, putting into question cultural, political and sexual identity.

Indirect Touch allows historic figures and contemporaries of Gufler to meet outside the boundaries of chronological order. Gufler gives them an indirect voice in the form of appropriated fragments (which cannot be identified as citations in all cases). However, he does not merely cite or reproduce these characters but rather condenses the attitudes associated with or expressed by them. In the process of indirect writing, Gufler repeatedly seems to merge with his characters. The persona that links all 21 chapters is Jäcki, based on the gay flaneur and writer-protagonist from Hubert Fichte’s novel Palette (1968). Like Fichte, Gufler makes use of the character Jäcki as screen as well as ambivalent Doppelgänger (who never fully becomes the alter ego). The character Jäcki becomes a medium for repeated autobiographical passages that may be subtly woven into the text but may also dominate whole chapters.

Gufler’s literary and artistic self-assessments are indirect yet at the same time true to the principle ‘Put your self in quotation marks – call yourself a novel ’. The Fichte quote from Versuch über die Pubertät (1974), parts of which Gufler previously used in an exhibition title, illustrates a decidedly self-critical distance towards an up-close autobiographical approach. That same principle also governs Gufler’s installations and performances. His approaches to a choice of characters from a long tradition of emancipatory history are marked by the artistic pursuit of deeper involvement in regards to emotions and content. Gufler temporarily merges with his subjects of study and, in doing so, self-referentially reveals a fundamental difference between those subjects and himself.Philipp Fürnkäs

On January 28th, we will open the exhibition Belong Anywhere at two
locations in Berlin. Following up the opening in the central exhibition
space – an AirBnB apartment – the second part of the show will take
place at ACUD MACHT NEU along with some drinks and music.

There will be a transfer via Uber-cars from the apartment to ACUD MACHT
NEU, that functions at the same time, as space of display for an
exhibition piece that has been conceived for especially this setting.
The Location of the apartment and the first part of the show, will be
announced the day of the opening – for this purpose please RSVP to
belonganywhereex@gmail.com.

The exhibition uses AirBnB’s popular tagline “Belong anywhere” as a
starting point, the promise of being at home anywhere in the world,
Berlin, Beirut, Beijing: AirBnB users travel to those cities not as mere
tourists, they purchase and enact the experience of temporary
affiliation to that place. In this notion Anywhere appears as an
imaginary space, translocal and globally homogenized.

The works
in the exhibition evolve around the trajectories and correlations
between the aesthetical strategies of the AirSpace and the effects of
displacement triggered by housing policies. Different artistic positions
investigate the entanglements of the DIY Bourgoisie with the semantic
sphere of private property and classification: This belongs to me and
not to you. This one belongs there and not here. The exhibition
approaches the coded attributes and operating modes oft he social,
imaginary space. Welcome Home.

Opening on January 28th at the
AirBnB apartment 6-9pm, at ACUD Studio from 8pm on. Followed by DJ Sets
by Marlene Stark and Elliver.

The exhibition is open on January
29th from 12-6 pm at the AirBnB apartment. The exact adress will be
send to you at the day oft he opening, please write to:
belonganywhereex@gmail.com